I recently decided to learn chinese again. I took chinese
lessons at the engineering school, but forgot almost everything!
Hopefully I still have the lessons and I have found a cool on-line
chinese course with audio samples on chinese-tools.com... but I
needed some way to monitor my progresses in vocabulary learning. I
quickly checked if there was some vocabulary training tool for Gnome but
couldn't find any satisfying tool. I thus decided to start my own tool.
As I wanted to learn GTK+ and C# Mono for quite a long time, I have
installed monodevelop and started coding. The sources are available
under GPL on gitorious but I'm not providing any binary yet: those
who want it will need to build it using monodevelop.

Here is a list of the current features, though they might change
quickly:

Definition of a sequence of lessons containing the vocabulary

The words can be grouped in some tags using drag and drop. This
helps to sort the words by lexical field (which is not always the
case in the lessons)

A word is composed of the term in the learned language, its
pronunciation and the translation in your language

Double clicking a word shows some details on it. For the moment,
they only include the strokes order for the CJK characters, but we
can easily imagine some connection with an on-line dictionary
showing synonyms or examples. The strokes order images are directly
fetched from the Strokes Order Project on Wikimedia commons.

The exercise mode asks for both the pronunciation and the word. The
results are stored to help see which words are mastered and which
need to be learned again.

Here are some screenshots of the application to help you see it without
building it first:

Main window

The exercise window

The strokes order

Of course if you wish to use it or improve it, I will appreciate any
help and comment. My short term plans for this are:

Adding some properties to the course, like the author, the learned
language

Adding grammar points to the lessons

Allowing nested tags

My goal for this application now is not to make it only a vocabulary
training tool, but something more complete. The ultimate feature I'ld
like to see there is the integration with some TTS with nice voices to
speak the words or even have some other exercise based on that for
listening comprehension.

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